Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential Reading, 5 April 2007
An excellent read, well written and apparently unbiased. The authors cover the return of British forces primarily in Burma and Malaya. Also covering the British military operations in Indochina and Indonesia and the events leading to the Partition of India.
The book covers a huge scope of much neglected history and should be read by anyone interested in this region. Especially the sections on Burma and Malaysia.
My only complaint is that the sections on each country ends with the departure of the British. I would have enjoyed reading a postscript of the politics of those countries after the end of military actions.
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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Far too dry, 20 Jul 2008
I hate not finishing a book I've started, but I was tempted to do so about 150 pages into this, after ploughing through another page-long paragraph. I persevered and there were some well-written and really interesting sections in the rest of the book, especially about Britain's involvement in Indonesia and Vietnam after WWII ended.
However, I feel the book suffers from the authors not knowing what to leave out and what needs to be more prominent. They try to cover too much - so we get the same amount of coverage of Malayan cinema in the 1940s as of the Communist murder of the high commissioner Sir Henry Gurney.
The prose is just too dry and although on the back it says it makes a point of showing what the events meant for ordinary people of the time, it doesn't do this nearly enough. It would really have benefited from some 'colour' - stories from Malayan or Indian civilians or British soldiers about what they went through.
The authors also condemn Britain for every action (the only Britons getting any credit at all are leftists like Tom Driberg) while giving a soft ride to the Communists and other 'insurgents'. So a disputed British atrocity in Malaya gets nine pages, while Communist murders are mentioned fleetingly. Britain's actions are compared to those of Japan's at times. Britain can hardly be proud of this part of its history, but compared to the actions of the French and the Dutch, never mind the Japanese, they certainly weren't the worst.
Overall, although it contains a lot of fascinating material, the book would have been so much better if it had been more focused and about 200 pages shorter.
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24 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant account of Labour's wars against national liberation movements, 18 May 2007
In this sequel to Bayly and Harper's superb history, `Forgotten armies: Britain's Asian empire and the war with Japan' (2004), they show how new nations were born from the wreck of Britain's Asian empire after World War Two.
In the 1930s and 1940s, 24 million people had been killed by the occupying Japanese forces. But even after Japan's defeat, Attlee's Labour government tried to forcibly overthrow the newly independent emerging states of Asia. Nominally committed to colonial independence, Labour was in practice a great friend to the `jolly old Empire', as Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin said.
Every country in the region had to fight to win their freedom. Communists had played leading roles in the national liberation struggles against Japanese imperialism, and they led these new struggles too.
By contrast, the Labour government played the leading role in the old colonial empires' attempted reconquests. In 1945, British and Indian troops reoccupied Malaya and Burma, and they occupied Thailand (intending to make it a new protectorate), half of Vietnam and Indonesia. As the Viceroy of India Archibald Wavell told the Cabinet, "SEAC [South East Asia Command] depends almost entirely on the loyalty and discipline of Indian troops." (SEAC was better known as `Save England's Asian Colonies'.) But as the Raj died it became harder to use India's troops to crush nationalist forces.
British-commanded Indian forces imposed martial law in South Vietnam. General Gracey rearmed French troops and Japanese POWs to crush the Vietnamese, aiding the French to reimpose their hated rule.
The Labour government also sent forces to Indonesia to help the Dutch to reimpose their colonial rule. Here too, they used Japanese troops, killing 7,000 Indonesians; British forces killed another 15,000 at Surabaya. Later, Australia's trade unions succeeded in preventing supplies reaching the British forces.
In Malaya, the `Emergency' was one of the longest and ugliest counter-insurgency wars of the twentieth century. The British army lost 509 killed; another 1,875 military and police were killed. They killed 6,705 guerrillas and an estimated 4,000 civilians. The RAF carried out large-scale bombing, using 1,000-pound bombs.
By 1954, the British occupiers had forcibly resettled more than a million Malayans. They also resettled 25,000 forest people, the Orang Asli, perhaps 7,000 of whom died in the camps. The deputy commissioner of police admitted that the condition of the internment camps was `now worse than that experienced by internees under the Jap regime'.
In 1948, British forces massacred 24 Chinese people at Batang Kali. The Malayan Attorney-General's report on the massacre mysteriously disappeared; there was no military investigation and all relevant records were destroyed. Four of the guardsmen admitted that they had killed the villagers in cold blood, but the government refused to accept their evidence and called off the inquiry.
Bayly and Harper write of the Labour government, "It would create a police state with a paternalist veneer that would become the hallmark of British counter-insurgency and would later be called `winning hearts and minds'." They describe "The maladministration and graft of the military administration; the wild and unchecked fury of white terror in the first years; the extra-judicial killings of young men and women; the grotesque atrocity exhibitions of the mutilated slain; the violence to family and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers and labourers during resettlement; the insidious small tyrannies of a vast and largely unaccountable bureaucracy; the racism and arrogance of empire." As the Malayans said, "The British treated us like coolies."
The authors conclude, "the Emergency was not - as invariably presented, then and since - a British victory." The Malayans did win their national independence.
Contrary to the official myth, Britain's Asian empire did not bestow independence and benign legacies on its colonies. As the authors sum up, "it must be remembered that the achievements of colonial rule, such as relatively stable and independent institutions of state, were not solely, or primarily, a colonial legacy. From the first collapse of colonial power in 1941 these institutions had been shaped by Asian initiative."
The fabled true socialists of Attlee's Labour government had launched a series of brutal, futile wars against South-East Asia's national liberation movements. Labour's efforts to reimpose imperialism visited enormous suffering, death and destruction on hundreds of millions of people.
Nonetheless, India won its independence in 1947, Burma in 1948. By 1949 the British and Dutch Asian Empires had been defeated, and the French would last only another five years. Despite Labour's efforts, the Asian peoples expelled the foreign occupier and won their national independence and sovereignty.
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by Edward Paice
